Multimedia is a term used to describe the combined use of different kinds of information. Examples of the different kinds of information include text documents, music, images, voice recordings, etc. The combined information is sometimes referred to as multimedia objects.
As the World Wide Web (WWW) becomes more popular, it is apparent that multimedia plays a critical role in effectively exchanging and disseminating information among users of the web. Multimedia can be used in many different applications, such as, for example, digital story telling, employee training, online music video, document with voice annotations, etc.
As the use of multimedia expands, there is a need for storing and retrieving the multimedia objects. In order for the multimedia objects to be easily retrievable, the multimedia objects have to be stored in a location where everyone can share and access them. One way of doing this is to store the multimedia objects on servers connected to the Internet. Using the HTTP protocol, a user from anywhere in the world can access the multimedia objects as long as that user knows about the URL associated with the multimedia objects. However, the user may not have control over the server(s) in order to organize the media objects according to their retrieval needs.
One main requirement to this approach is that in order to access the Internet, the user needs to have an Internet access device such as, for example, a personal computer. What is needed is a way to organize the multimedia objects such that users can easily access them.